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Data protection vendors set sights on SharePoint

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is fast becoming the collaboration platform of choice, but not without creating complexities for backup and archiving (see "Protecting SharePoint data," Storage, May 2007). "It's like this sleeping giant," says Lauren Whitehouse, an analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, Milford, MA, referring to Microsoft's shipping of free SharePoint services on Windows Server 2003. "I think some people just started using it without a lot of thought about the data protection and archiving implications." SharePoint keeps data in databases, which grow quickly as incremental versions of active items are retained. As a result, "the ability to recover individual versions of a document becomes critical," says Randy DeMeno, chief evangelist at CommVault. In addition, companies are realizing that SharePoint increases the need to do some form of archiving, both to optimize performance and for compliance. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mandate the retention of all electronically stored information, "which...

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The third annual Diogenes Labs-Storage magazine Quality Award for enterprise arrays saw some changes among the vendors, but a familiar theme prevailed as Hitachi Data Systems copped top honors for the third time.

The emerging class of mixed SAS and SATA storage systems could be the next big disruptive technology. Mixing high- and low-cost SAS and SATA disk drives within the same system, at interconnect speeds comparable to Fibre Channel, is a recipe for significant change and opens the door to data lifecycle management.

iSCSI storage systems are showing up in medium-sized businesses, but storage managers at large enterprise shops have been reluctant to embrace them. This is largely because Fibre Channel (FC) is so firmly entrenched in bigger companies. But iSCSI offers some unique benefits that may appeal to shops with FC-only environments.

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Given current practices, it's questionable whether electronic information created and stored today will be usable 10 years or 15 years from now. The steps we take now will greatly affect the magnitude of the problem facing us (or our successors) in the future.

They may not be the sexy new technologies of the moment, but boring "vision" tools that provide insight and report on storage infrastructure are as necessary to your environment as ensuring that the system you run is getting power from the wall.

In the near future, encryption technologies will closely mirror the old "death and taxes" cliché as one of those things that are inevitable. Approximately 25% of enterprises have gotten the encryption message, but the vast majority are still on the sidelines.